[NOTE: I do not necessarily agree with all the things written by Walther F. Mueller; I merely archive this newsletter because it does contain interesting bits worth saving.]

Dear Fellow Patriot!

Zundel In Germany:

http://www.adelaideinstitute.org

For Zundel updates please visit the above website!

To submit news, information, etc. about Ernst Zundel,
please e-mail

info@adelaideinstitute.org

I wasn’t prepared for another anniversary, when I
opened The Bee this morning. The headline:

“Survivors Remember Buchenwald.”

Pavel Kohn arrived at Buchenwald Concentration Camp a
frostbitten, exhausted 14-year old Jewish orphan; his
parents and older brother had already been killed in
the Nazi holocaust.

Kohn was amongst the lucky ones rescued by the
American troops, 60 years ago.

Pavel Kohn lives with his wife in Bavaria today and
guess what his occupation was before he got retired?
Journalist! Now and his as ludicrous as all the other
stories:

His fairytale begins with the statement:

“Unlike Auschwitz, Buchenwald had no gas chambers.
Here, prisoners were mainly worked to death. The SS
guards called them ‘Singing Horses'”.

What a lie! “Singing horses?” Such phrase does not
exist in the German language.

That lying son of a bitch goes on to tell that Ilse
Koch, the commandant’s wife, had lampshades made from
dead prisoners skin. Even the Jews own researchers
have admitted that there were never lampshades from
dead people’s skin. Just like with the soap. The media
knows this, and just like the 6 million number, they
continue to print these monster stories that are
nothing but the imagination of sick people. But, I
guess, the American people believe anything.

240,000 prisoners were brought to Buchenwald,
according to Kohn. Starvation, disease, and medical
experiments claimed many lives. And here is another
whoopi:

“While the SS had a zoo, riding hall, and
brothel…..”

Imagine this!

I am not sure how many concentration camps were
actually liberated. How many more “anniversaries” can
we expect in the near future?

This morning, I was talking with Dr. Margaret Stucki,
discussing the very same issue. We were wondering why
logical thinking has left the American mind.
Especially the young people who should be curious and
suspicious, have become the most brainwashed of them
all.

A teacher tells the class that 6 million Jews were
killed by the Nazis, many of them gassed to death.
Never mind that experts today can’t even gas more than
one person a day. So how is it possible that 60 years
ago they could gas this many?

Or, as Dr. Stucki explained, there were only 500,000
Jews in Germany, many thousands left Germany. There
weren’t 6 million in the entire world.

But, I guess, these questions won’t even pop up in the
mushy brains of our young people. The complete
dishonesty on the whole issue drives me sometimes
nuts. As I mentioned before, the media continues to
print stories, which they know are not true, and the
rest of the American people falls in tears whenever
they hear that 300 Jews have been gassed in a room
with 50 sf. Not even there are questions asked.

Adelaide Institute:

http://www.adelaideinstitute.org

[START]

Cockroach bombs blow up restaurant
09:55 AEST Sat Apr 9 2005

A combination of 36 cockroach bombs and an oven pilot
light has blown apart a Thai restaurant in Perth,
injuring three men, two seriously.

A massive explosion rocked suburban Duncraig when
chemicals released during Wednesday night’s
do-it-yourself fumigation ignited, blowing out the
back wall and lifting the roof off the Tamarind
restaurant.

The blast caused an estimated $500,000 damage, fire
authorities said.

The restaurant owner and two staff members had closed
the premises to set off 36 insect control bombs
throughout the building.

Eight would have been enough, said West Australian
police and fire and emergency personnel.

Investigators said they believed a pilot light in one
of the restaurant’s ovens ignited the huge amount of
chemicals released by the bombs to kill insects such
as fleas and cockroaches.

The three men, who had reached the restaurant’s front
door when the explosion occurred, were hospitalised
with burns.

John McMillan, manager of WA’s fire investigations
unit, said the pressure wave from the blast was
powerful enough to lift the roof off the building.

“The restaurant owner has used the principle that if
you use twice the soap, you get your hands twice as
clean. He’s just overdone it,” Mr McMillan said.

“This could have been a tragedy, although the men have
been hospitalised it does not look as bad as first
thought.

“This (cockroach bomb) is a good product, but this
incident shows if you don’t read the manufacturer’s
instructions, there can be very serious consequences.”

WA police said all three men were treated at Royal
Perth Hospital for burns.

Two of the men remained in the hospital’s burns unit,
with one suffering burns to 45 per cent of his body.
The third went home after treatment.

Duncraig fire station officer Kieran Cooper said crews
arrived to find the building devastated.

RK comment: Although it’s not ZyklonB it shows how
dangerous fumigation is, and the Nazis supposedly did
this daily with electrical connections in the Krema
without incident.
============
Tamihere ‘sick’ of Holocaust

John Tamihere

10.04.05
by David Fisher and Jonathan Milne

Labour MP John Tamihere says he is “sick and tired of
hearing how many Jews got gassed”.

The comments – branded yesterday by the Jewish Council
as “sickening” and “deeply shocking for all Jews” –
were made in the same interview in which Mr Tamihere
referred to Cabinet minister Chris Carter as a
“tosser” and “queer” and Cabinet minister Steve
Maharey as “smarmy”. They were released yesterday by
Investigate magazine editor Ian Wishart after a spat
with Mr Tamihere about the recording of the interview.

Alerted yesterday to the remark, Prime Minister Helen
Clark said through a spokesman that while the
government understood the pain the comment caused the
Jewish community, she was certain Mr Tamihere meant no
offence.

In the interview, Mr Tamihere is asked by Mr Wishart
about how a society can be focused on injustices of
the past.

Mr Tamihere responds: “The Wiesenthal Institute is the
same. I’m sick and tired of hearing how many Jews got
gassed, not because I’m not revolted by it – I am – or
I’m not violated by it – I am – but because I already
know that.

“How many times do I have to be told and made to feel
guilty?”

David Zwartz, president of the New Zealand Jewish
Council, said Mr Tamihere’s comment was sickening for
New Zealand Jews who suffered in the Holocaust and
whose families were gassed.

“It is deeply shocking for all other Jews, as was the
earlier trivialising of the Holocaust by Mrs Tariana
Turia. Jews have no desire to make Mr Tamihere or
anyone feel guilty, we only want to have the historic
truth known and understood so discrimination and
oppression leading to genocide won’t happen again.”

Victoria University political scientist Dr Jon
Johansson said he was sure Ms Clark would have been
appalled by the comment. “The Holocaust aspect – there
is no redemptive quality to that thought. It
contributes nothing, it pollutes our discourse,” he
said. “The prime minister and the party are on the
horns of a dilemma, where they have to weigh up
principle against the practical reality of risking
losing the already fragile blue-collar vote.

“It does look like the final straw – and it’s tinder
dry.”

Mr Wishart decided to release the comments after it
emerged Mr Tamihere and one other person had returned
to Soljans Cafe in West Auckland to talk to staff
about the recording of the interview. The Agenda
programme was contacted by a “source close to Mr
Tamihere” offering tape recordings of staff who
apparently said there was no recording device on the
table when the MP lunched with Mr Wishart.

Tony Soljan, managing director of Soljans Estate
Winery, said yesterday Mr Tamihere and the other
person had talked to staff, who had asked that any
conversation with them not be recorded. Mr Soljan said
his staff felt “let down” when it emerged they had
been taped.

Mr Wishart said the attempted “cover-up” by Mr
Tamihere meant further excerpts would be released. He
would also be lodging a complaint with TVNZ over its
handling of the issue on Agenda yesterday.

Last night, Mr Tamihere refused to comment, although
confirmed he had returned to the winery and spoken to
staff.

He said he believed they were happy to be taped.

In a later conversation, Mr Tamihere said he was glad
the comments were out now so Mr Wishart didn’t get
another edition out of the interview.

– additional reporting Jonathan Dow

– Herald on Sunday

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=2&ObjectID=10119675

[END]

Desider22:

[START]

Pat Robertson/Jerry Falwell-style Protestant
evangelicalism as a moral value, which it isn’t.
(Protestant evangelicalism is a political ideology,
not a religious one.)

That’s an understatement. They and a few others are
the worst kind of public-brain washers.
The even invited government officials of the “Middle
east” to their sermons to promote unjustified even
morderous actions.

[END]

From Monika:

[START]

Field Reports from two more Minutemen

This correspondent spent 40 hours as a Minuteman
watching the US Border in Arizona:

Every Minuteman and woman I met voted for Bush as less
of of two evils or voted Constitutional Party. All
were average income families; sick of Washington
double speak. all praised O’reilly and Dobbs and to a
lesser degree Hannity and Ingrahm shows. All were
educated on the subject. 70 percent were over 30 yrs
and the remainder late 20’s-30’s. No one was a klans
man, some were teachers, and business owners and some
ex-military and police.

Here is a letter I wrote to Houston ChronicleL
Michela, you reached Bill Breaux with the Minutemen
Project. I helped patrol the border of Arizona for 4
nights for total of 40 hrs (basically a week on the
job at the border). local border agents applauded our
efforts while their bosses criticized us in the media.
Local ranchers and their wives told us they never felt
safer than the past week, nor has it been more quiet
and calm along the 23 mile stretch of border we helped
protect. The only reason Minutemen are “armed” is due
to the fact that drug smugglers, corrupt Mexican
border guards, and terrorists cross the Mexican border
daily and our weapons were for our protection against
these (vile individuals). My hat comes off to the
ladies on patrol with us. They did not hesitate
standing guard at night in what can be a scary place.

The local papers gave us popular coverage as well as
the Bill O’reilly show. I encourage all Houstonians to
watch Lou Dobbs tonight on CNN and Bill O’reilly and
his radio show too. They stand up for rights of
Americans citizens:in the face of foreign invasion
from the south by millions of Mexican nationals who
include thousands that rape, murder and rob Americans.
Included in the ranks of illegal aliens are hundred of
thousands of OTM’s (Other Than Mexicans) who are all
potential terrorists. Hopefully the Chronicle will
stop burying homeland security issues and the crimes
on non-citizens on the 20th+ pages of it’s newspaper.

Hispanic crime is up 65%, illegal immigration is up
40% since President Bush took office. No increase of
education dollars (via tax increases) over the last
several decades has increased the graduation numbers
from minority ranks. Minority issues are best solved
by minority members; Bill Cosby more or less stated
that before the press attacked him for it! The border
issue is best handled by the American citizen when his
elected officials and their appointed border officials
refuse to! Only when illegal immigration is ended at
the border can a guest worker program be considered or
for that matter work. Lawlessness and ignoring of
immigration laws begets chaos and crime. President
Bush and his political buddies won’t be in office
forever. The Minutemen have the support of 90% of
America, as much as the media/news agencies/newspapers
and President Bush wish that support did not exist.

President. Fox: go to church and ask God for
forgivenss and start taking care of the social needs
of the citizens of your Mexico. Stop depending on the
goodwill and blind eye of the American people to stem
the tide of unrest amongst Mexicans who are tired of
your nation’s corruption and lack of “will” to create
a social system and educational system the people
deserve.

155 nations are poorer than Mexico. Mxico has a 498
billion dollar economy; Mexico is an oil producing
nation, so the time for social change in Mexico is
now. Stop sending the U.S.. your poor and unwanted.
President Fox take care of your people! America has
founding fathers! Mexico has had dastardly dictators,
I pray Vicente Fox will not go down in history as
dictator who refuses to address his nation’s
shortcomings.

God bless america,
Bill Breaux

Another eyewitness Minuteman report:
Report from a Minuteman Project “Minutewoman” just
back from the Front Lines
email | 9 April 2005 | A Minutewoman

I was on the Naco, Arizona/Mexican border 6am – 2pm
daily from Sunday to Wednesday, with two other
Minutewomen and two Minutemen.

Below is the story a rancher’s wife told me, who lives
on 800 acres of land, in the family since the 1880s.
Their ranch begins at the Mexican border.

Her name is Robin. She and her husband, Edward, have
four children. They came to our Minuteman post
requesting that Minutemen be stationed on their nearby
property.

Robin said she hears gunshot every night on her ranch.
Has no idea exactly where it is coming from.

Since the Minutemen arrived, she claims the gunshots
have stopped.

Recently, a drunken illegal alien wandered onto their
ranch at night. She was home alone with her children.
The illegal alien pounded on their front door. Robin
said she and her terrified children crawled on their
stomachs to the back of their house to get away from
him. While retelling this event, her pretty eyes were
filled with both terror and humiliation.

The family’s ranch is stampeded by illegal crossings.
Years ago, they said their ranch was peaceful and
safe. That it was rare to see illegal crossers.

The husband, Edward, said he was recently on his
property and was astounded to count over 200 illegal
crossers in a group nearby. He said he called the
border patrol on his cellular phone.

He was told by the woman on the phone that it was not
possible to see 200 hundred crossers because they
would never cross in such a large group. As he was
being told this, the 200 were crossing right before
his eyes!

This ranching family thanked us profusely. They said
if we needed anything – food, showers, rest – we were
welcome at their home. The gruff rancher husband had
tears in his eyes when he said goodbye, thanking us.

OUR MINUTEMAN TEAM

In our sector, teams of Minutemen from two to five set
up on a hillside along a dirt road ten paces from the
border of Mexico. I think we had a total of nine
teams. Although too far to talk, you could see a
Minuteman team on either side of you. We communicated
with each team via walkie-talkie radios.

It was very well organized. We had a MMP supervisor
driving by periodically. Each team was encouraged to
fly their state flag.

A New York flag was flying from the team to our west
and a Florida flag flying from the team to our east.
Our team flew an American and a Californian flag
combo.

For 8 hour shifts around the clock, Minutemen – a
giant neighborhood watch – were armed with binoculars,
cellular phones and handheld walkie-talkie radios. We
set up lawn chairs and umbrellas. Posted a sign that
read, “Californians for Secure Borders.” In our spare
time, we threw a boomerang, flew a kite. We played
CDs.

In short, we were noisy and visible. Chris Simcox had
said noise was a good thing at a Minuteman post to
deter would-be crossers.

There was a showing of border patrol helicopters,
border patrol SUVs, sheriff vehicles, border patrol on
scooters. In short, there was a steady stream of law
enforcement on this normally deserted stretch of
border land.

We were told by local ranchers that they have never
seen so many border patrol. That this show of force
was for the MMP.

THE FENCE/the trash
The barbed wire border fence is a joke. It’s about
shoulder high.

Our team’s section of fence, about a two block area,
had four crossing areas. The barbed wire has been
stretched and cut to accommodate crossers. On the
Mexican side, trails through the desert shrubs lead up
to the passage holes in the barbed wire fence.

Some of the holes are large enough to accommodate a
pair of crossers walking hand in hand.

Our area was littered with many Gatorade bottles.
Many, many plastic bags. Tins of foot fungicide.
Deodorant cans.

There were endless numbers of cans, sweatshirts, a
hair brush, razors, a cell phone, a little Spanish
Bible, many backpacks, sandals, tennis shoes,
blankets, a powder puff, tuna cans, Tequila bottles,
beer cans, a well used address book in Spanish. We
found three one dollar bills rolled up and covered in
dirt. One of our Minutewomen found a black ski mask.

There were many toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste.

It is heart breaking to see the beautiful desert
literally covered in trash. The trash is just spread
all over. If you walk a few steps there is some form
of trash within view. Many, many plastic bags fly on
trees and shrubs. The size of bags vary from those
big, black outdoor trash bags down to the small
postcard sized plastic bags.

Where the hell are the environmentalists on this issue
of unbelievable trash? Is there anywhere else in the
United States with such out of control environmental
destruction that gets so little environmental
attention? It is perplexing.

The Mexican side was desolate except for a train track
and a highway in the distance. Desert foliage was
crisscrossed with paths leading to the fence.

MEXICO BEEFS UP ITS FORCE

We read in local newspapers that the Mexican
government had beefed up their forces where the MMP
were stationed.

For example, a Mexican group on Mexican soil that
supposedly rescues crossers, called Grupo Beta, was
stationed to encourage crossers approaching the 20
mile MMP teams to return home. We were told military
were also in the area.

The Grupo Beta wore bright orange shirts and drove new
orange trucks. We usually had one to two trucks within
our binocular vision, with several orange coats per
truck.

The local ranchers told us that they had never seen
these “orange coats” before. It was a first for them.

We watched the orange guys with our binoculars. From
our lawn chairs, armed with walkie-talkie radios and
bottled waters.

We watched them drive around in their orange trucks.
They would park under trees and eat their lunches. Get
out and walk around. Go under bridges where migrants
camp.

We would from time to time see people who may have
been migrants [translation: illegal aliens] get in the
backs of their orange trucks.

One time we saw a group of about 8 single file coming
over the horizon. Our entire 9 team section activated.
We were radioing each other. All posted with
binoculars. We were a-buzz!

Well, they turned out to be reporters! American
reporters interviewing the Mexican national government
workers. They all walked up to the fence, with the
“humanitarian” workers and we talked for quite a
while.

The humanitarian Mexican worker spoke no English. But
interpreters said they wanted to show us a baggy they
handed out to crossers with snack bars and water They
offered to give us food and water.

Another Mexican national farmer approached us later on
horseback and stated illegal crossers only want to
work. Again, we had a peaceful conversation.

But what we can say is that while we were posted for
24 hours at our section not one illegal crosser
traversed the well-worn paths. They did not walk
through the openings in the barbed wire, as they
normally do.

On Tuesday, we did see a young man appear among the
orange guys who had a huge rifle slung over his
shoulder. The Minutemen in my group knew the rifle
make and said it had a scope. This guy was in his 20s,
in a tee shirt, black pants and baseball cap. No
uniform.

Our entire line watched him through binoculars. He
would zigzag around. Talk to the orange coats. Zigzag
more. Our radio walkie-talkie info finally declared
they thought he was police. He eventually walked out
of view over a hill.

When I related the event to a local rancher who
stopped by to talk with us, he told me that the guy
was definitely a coyote. He also said anyone out there
on the Mexican side is part of the bribery and
smuggling even if they are government employees.

BORDER PATROL AGENTS

There were border patrol supervisors who would drive
around and talk to the press. They would spin a line
worthy of Bush and DHS.

But when there were no supervisors around, the rank
and file border patrol would occasionally speak to us.
It was brave of them as they wear name badges.

One border patrol agent told me that the Mexican
humanitarian orange coat guys routinely shake down the
crossers. He laughed when I called the Mexican orange
coats humanitarians.

Another agent told me that the border patrol was very
glad we were there. When we asked about the so called
sensors Minutemen were setting off, he laughed and
said the spokesmen were saying what they’d been told
to say.

He gave us a thumbs up when he drove off. They also
communicated that the illegal crossing activity is
very well orchestrated and run.

RANCHERS and locals
Our arrival has been controversial among the locals.

I stayed at the Bible College and went to the Bible
College church on Sunday. Two pastors focused their
talks on their gratitude for the Minutemen. One pastor
asked for Minutemen to stand. There were only about
five us in attendance.

The pastor then told the church people to go to us and
shake our hands. But the churchgoers approached us and
hugged us! Some held onto me like I was a life safer!
A line formed as mothers, children, old ladies, teens
embraced the Minutemen.

We did have locals express discord about MMP, but they
were the exception in my experience.

Our night shift had said that a rancher had pulled up
in his truck, emerged from the darkness, holding the
hands of his two small children and thanked the
Minutemen over and over. The night shift Minuteman
told me that that the rancher had tears in his eyes as
he thanked them. The Minuteman who listened to the
rancher and told me of the experience, is a tough,
muscular, no-nonsense former military guy. But when he
told me this story about the rancher, he said his eyes
welled up with tears too when the rancher expressed
his gratitude.

When a group of us were at a local cafe, a local guy
came up and grilled us. Gave us his stories about his
mother’s property being ransacked by crossers. He then
wrote down the name of a section where he asked the
Minutemen to go to.

I told the locals that would give me suggestions that
they should contact the leadership of MMP with their
referrals. I was a peon just following the orders.

If you were a Minuteman, someone would inevitably
request you patrol some section.

It absolutely makes my blood boil to think of
government letting these hard working American
citizens’ ranches literally be invaded! I told them
all that they are heroes. Most said they will never
leave their ranches!

ACLU

As we did a shift, it was always a treat to talk to
anyone new. Locals. Reporters. Photographers.
Minutemen wandering about.

It wasn’t any different when you would come upon an
ACLU person. I talked to all of them I saw. We would
just chitchat about whatever. Most seemed to be
college aged. I told a couple I spoke to that I was
glad they were there. I said they didn’t want violence
and neither did we. I thanked them for being there
watching.

After all, with them standing among us, they only made
our numbers look bigger before the illegal crossers.
In that regard, they made us appear larger in force.

Personally, I had no problem with the ACLU at the MMP.
They would just stand around quietly in their matching
tee shirts. As the week wore on, I noticed the number
of ACLU observers diminished significantly.

It was apparent that where we stood illegal crossings
stopped. The shift went by fast because there was
always some rumor flying around. Like the day when the
rumor went round that 12 rancher skinheads were going
to attack the Bible College. There was always somebody
new coming up to investigate our team.

Minutemen and ranchers would drive by with all sorts
of comments. Reporters from London, Mexico, all over
the US were constantly wanting to talk and be led
around to see various sites.

And you could look through binoculars and watch the
orange guys. Or birds. The media loved to film you
looking through the binoculars. I would sometimes just
be watching a bird or a butterfly when I was being
filmed looking through my binoculars by the media.

I only regret I couldn’t stay for the full Minuteman
Project! It was awesome. I met some great people from
New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Kansas, lots
of Texans and Californians. Most were just run of the
mill, salt of the earth typical hard working American
citizens.

Only last week , the Zionist or the Israelis or should
I say the Jews have shot dead three young Palestinian
boys who were playing Soccer, they have seen them and
have recognized them as young boys, they knew for sure
that they were playing with a ball, they saw very
clearly that they were not carrying cannons or riding
any tank, nevertheless they aimed and they opened fire
and shot the three of them dead they murdered them in
cold blood .
Do you think anybody cared ???
Where is The American president and his hoodlums who
only care about trifles like when an Egyptian
opposition was accused of forgery , Condalisa rice
made a fuss about it ….
where are the Europeans ?? where are everybody ???
Where is the CNN and the BBC and the rest of the media
trumpets that pierce our ears when only one Israeli
dies …????
The same with Rachel Corrie the Israelis killed her in
cold blood and no one raised a finger ….
What is the secret of Israel ??
What is the secret of that cancer that is permitted to
kill and destroy and nobody give a damn about it .

Cherif Loutfi

Subject: Rachel Corrie’s Testament. Poignant

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1454952,00.html

‘Let me fight my monsters’

Two years ago Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American
protester, was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza.
Since then she has become a potent symbol for both
sides of the conflict. But who was the real Rachel?
Katharine Viner, who has edited her writings for a new
play, on an ordinary woman with an extraordinary
passion

Friday April 8, 2005
The Guardian

There is a particular entry in Rachel Corrie’s diary,
probably written some time in 1999, four years before
she was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza
Strip trying to prevent the demolition of Palestinian
homes. She is aged 19 or 20. “Had a dream about
falling, falling to my death off something dusty and
smooth and crumbling like the cliffs in Utah,” she
writes, “but I kept holding on, and when each foothold
or handle of rock broke I reached out as I fell and
grabbed a new one. I didn’t have time to think about
anything – just react as if I was playing an
adrenaline-filled video game. And I heard, ‘I can’t
die, I can’t die,’ again and again in my head.”

Last year, I was asked by the Royal Court theatre to
edit the writings of Rachel Corrie into a drama with
Alan Rickman, who was also directing. I had read the
powerful emails she sent home from Gaza, serialised in
G2 in the days after her death, and I’d read
eye-witness accounts on the internet. But I didn’t
know that Rachel’s early writing – before she even
thought of travelling to the Middle East, from her
days as a schoolgirl, through college, to life working
at a mental-health centre in her home town of Olympia,
Washington – would be similarly fascinating, and
contain such elements of chilling prescience. Nor did
I have a sense of the kind of person Rachel Corrie
was: a messy, skinny, Dali-loving, listmaking
chainsmoker,! with a passion for the music of Pat
Benatar. I discovered all that later.
Rachel was killed, aged 23, on March 16 2003, by a
Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer, a vehicle especially built
to demolish houses. Three decades before, her father
had driven bulldozers in Vietnam for the US army. Her
death was the first of a string of killings of
westerners in Gaza in spring 2003, as the war was
taking place in Iraq: Briton Tom Hurndall, 22, shot on
April 11; another Briton, cameraman James Miller, 34,
shot on May 16. She and Hurndall were activists in the
International Solidarity Movement (ISM), an
organisation set up “to support Palestinian
non-violent resistance to Israel’s military
occupation”. Rachel was killed only two days before
the start of the assault on Baghdad while the world
was mostly looking elsewhere.

She became a martyr to the Palestinians, a victim of
their intifada who had stood up to the mighty Israeli
army; Edward Said praised her actions as “heroic and
dignified at the same time”. But many Israelis
considered her at best naive, interfering in a
situation she didn’t understand. And to some Americans
she was a traitor; websites blared that “she should
burn in hell for an eternity”; “Good riddance to bad
rubbish”; “I’m thankful she died.”

Those close to Rachel would rather she had not become
famous for being the blonde American girl who got
killed. As her ex-boyfriend Colin Reese said in the
documentary Death of an Idealist: “The person that I
knew has been summed up as a bullet point…
Everything that Rachel was, every brilliant idea she
had, every art project she did, it doesn’t matter,
because she has become her death.” Reese committed
suicide last year.

In developing this piece of theatre, we wanted to
uncover the young woman behind the political symbol,
beyond her death. As Alan Rickman, whose idea it was
to turn Rachel’s work into drama, says: “We were never
going to paint Rachel as a golden saint or
sentimentalise her, but we also needed to face the
fact that she’d been demonised. We wanted to present a
balanced portrait.” We hoped to find out what made
Rachel Corrie different from the stereotype of today’s
consumerist, depoliticised youth. Having received
permission from Rachel’s parents to shape her words
into drama, we were sent an enormous package – 184
pages of her writing, most of which had not been seen
before.

The material revealed a woman who was both ordinary
and extraordinary: writing poems about her cat, her
friends, her grand mother, the wind; but also, from a
strikingly young age, engaging passionately with the
world, trying to find her place in it. The earliest
material we have is political; aged 10, Rachel wrote a
poem about how “children everywhere are suffering” and
how she wished to “stop hunger by the year 2000”. Her
juvenilia shows, as Rickman says, that she “already
knew what language was. She was witty, a storyteller,
she had flights of fancy”. It also shows a rather
sweet seriousness, and an insight into the wider world
and her place in it. Aged 12, she writes, “I guess
I’ve grown up a little. It’s all relative anyway; nine
years is as long as 40 years depending on how long
you’ve lived”.

In her teens, Rachel started to write about the “fire
in my belly” that was to become a recurring theme. She
visited Russia, a trip that opened her eyes to the
rest of the world – she found it “flawed, dirty,
broken and gorgeous”. And she engaged in a striking
way with her parents, with writing that beautifully
expresses ordinary anxieties about safety and freedom,
which become particularly poignant in light of
Rachel’s violent death. Aged 19 she wrote to her
mother, “I know I scare you… But I want to write and
I want to see. And what would I write about if I only
stayed within the doll’s house, the flower-world I
grew up in?… I love you but I’m growing out of what
you gave me… Let me fight my monsters. I love you.
You made me. You made me.”

She stewed, in typical late-teens fashion, on her
future, and wrote about men and sex, from falling “in
love with someone who is perpetually leaving you…
and tells all stories as if they are blues songs” to
bumping into an ex-boyfriend with his “hoochie-ass”
new lover. Her wit was of the sardonic kind, and is
one of the main things her friends remember about her.

Rachel’s political evolution gathered pace in her
early 20s. She went to Evergreen state college, a
famously liberal university in Olympia, itself a
famously liberal town. She began railing against how
“the highest level of humanity is expressed through
what we choose to buy at the mall”. After September
11, she became involved in community activism,
organising a peace march, but questioned the wider
relevance of what she was doing: “People [are]
offering themselves as human shields in Palestine and
I [am] spending all of my time making dove costumes
and giant puppets.” When she finally decided that she
wanted to go to the Middle East, she explained her
reason quite specifically: “I’ve had this underlying
need to go to a place and meet people who are on the
other end of the portion of my tax money that goes to
fund the US and other militaries.”

When Rachel arrived in Rafah in the Gaza Strip, as
Rickman says, “the rhythm of the writing changes
dramatically. She has less time to consider but you
can feel the growing fear.” The Gaza dispatches are
hard-hitting and intense, representing a profound
experience. On arrival in Jerusalem she was shocked to
see the Star of David spray-painted on to doors in the
Arab section of the old city: “I have never seen the
symbol used in quite that way… I am used to seeing
the cross used in a colonialist way”. In Gaza, she
carried the body of a dead man on a stretcher while
the Israeli army shot in front of her, but mostly her
activism involved protection: staying overnight in the
homes of families on the front line to stop their
demolition; standing in front of water workers at a
well in Rafah as they they came under fire; “close
enough to spray debris in their faces”. (Before her
death, Rachel believed, as did many activists, that
her “! international white person privilege” would
keep her relatively safe.) Witnessing the occupation
in action inspired in Rachel her strongest writing; in
her last days her rage and bafflement at what she saw
led to work of astonishing and cumulative power.

But the quantity of the material left us with a series
of questions. How much of Rachel’s life before she
went to Gaza should we include? And should we quote
other people? The trend in political theatre, from
David Hare’s The Permanent Way to Victoria Brittain
and Gillian Slovo’s Guantánamo, is journalistic: the
use of testimony, of interviews and on-the-record
material rather than invention. But for us there could
be no re-interviewing to fill in the gaps. We had a
finite amount of words to work with, as Rachel was
dead. I was very keen to use some of the emails that
Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Craig, sent to their
daughter while she was in Gaza. They are full of the
kind of worries any parent might have if their child
was in a dangerous situation, but because Rachel never
came home, they have a devastating poignancy. Two
weeks before her daughter’s death, Cindy emailed
Rachel: “There is a lot in my heart but I am having
trouble ! with the words. Be safe, be well. Do you
think about coming home? Because of the war and all? I
know probably not, but I hope you feel it would be OK
if you did.”

And what about the voices of Rachel’s friends? I
interviewed many fellow ISM activists, most of whom
have been deported from Israel since her death. We
watched tapes of two of the moving memorial services:
one in Gaza, which was shot at by the Israeli army,
another in Olympia. We viewed documentaries on the
subject, most notably Sandra Jordan’s powerful The
Killing Zone, and considered using video grabs. But in
the end the power of Rachel’s writing meant that,
apart from a few short passages quoting her parents
and an eye witness report of her death, her words were
strong enough to stand alone.

The challenge, then, was trying to construct a piece
of theatre from fragments of journals, letters and
emails, none of which was written with performance in
mind. It helped, as Rickman says, that Rachel’s
writing “has a kind of theatricality. The images jump
off the page.” As the process went on, the difference
between my usual job, journalism, and theatre, became
obvious: stagecraft is what makes theatre what it is,
and there was no point creating scenes that read well
on the page if the actor playing Rachel, Megan Dodds,
could not perform them.

We’ve tried to do justice to the whole of Rachel:
neither saint nor traitor, both serious and funny,
messy and talented, devastatingly prescient and human
and whole. Or, in her own words, “scattered and
deviant and too loud”. We chose Rachel’s words rather
than those of the thousands of Palestinian or Israeli
victims because of the quality and accessibility of
the writing: as Rickman says, “The activist part of
her life is absolutely matched by the imaginative part
of her life. I’ve no doubt at all that had she lived
there would have been novels and plays pouring out of
her.” The tragedy is that we’ll hear no more from
Rachel Corrie.

· My Name Is Rachel Corrie is at the Royal Court,
Sloane Square, London SW1 until April 30. Box office:
020-7565 5000.